Many food experts warn against cross contamination – one should wash everything after handling raw poultry or pork.
On the Food Network the other day, Mario Batali, the famous New York chef, handled fresh chicken, and with a light hand-wipe using his apron continued to touch the prepared food.
Is the whole cross-contamination bit exaggerated?
Hmmm… prices aren’t that bad at his restaurant. I thought everything in a decent New York City restaurant started at $ 50 or so an entree.
[sub]I’m a bumpkin.[/sub]
well this is a bit off subject, but I used to have a roommate who would scoop the kitty litter and then not wash his hands. He didn’t get sick, and despite touching all the doorknobs in the house, none of us got sick either. I’ll tell you that I’ve been cross contaminating my chicken products for years and never been sick from something I cooked. Everytime i’ve gotten food poisoning from chicken its been in a bad mexican food restaurant with a big vat of shredded meat.
I would say definetly clean your cutting board afterwards, but I wouldn’t stress about it. Especially if you’re touching things that will also be fried or cooked.
Sometimes I think the experts are just a little too overly cautious about cross contamination. For instance, Alton Brown, when he did a show on frying chicken was so cautious that he uses two sets of tongs for frying the chicken… one for putting it in, one for taking it out. I’ve never ever gotten sick from using the same pair of tongs for moving friend chicken around. If you’re that worried about the chicken contaminating the tongs, stick the tongs in the hot oil for a few minutes if it bothers you that much.
Of course Alton Brown has also said that tomatillos are not related to tomatoes, but to cape gooseberries (i suppose he was being especially strict… but all three are in the nighshade family), and he claimed that California bay (Umbellularia californica) was not related to true Bay Leaves, but to Eucalyptus, based solely on the fact that there’s a hint of eucalyptus in California bay (he’s incredibly wrong… California bay isn’t at all related to Eucalypts (myrtle family) but it is related to true bay leaves (California and True Bay are both in the Laurel family).
I think a lot of times it’s done by the networks to prevent lawsuits from occurring.
The trouble with not being zealous about hygienic food preparation practices, is that on those rare occasions when there is a nasty bacteria on your chicken or german sausage, it is much more likely to make you sick or kill you if you’ve allowed yourself to get sloppy.
Batali also never wears a hairnet, or plastic gloves (as required by NYC health laws). Shoot…somebody ought to sue the guy, just on general principles! :smack:
Emeril doesn’t either! At least not on any of his shows I’ve seen.
In my opinion, there is a bit of an alarmist mentality regarding bacteria but reasonable precautions should be taken when handling meat. If you do get sick, it could be nasty. In defense of cooking shows, due to time constraints, they skip alot of the steps to get to ther heart of what they are trying to teach the tv viewer. When they sit down at the end (if they do this at all on a show) and dine on their creation, they are eating something that has been premade (usually) not the one they slopped together in the 30 minutes of airtime you are watching.
Many people get a ‘24 bug’ or the 24 hour Flu (which isn’t the flu) …and it is just basic food poisoning. Symptoms include trips to the bathroom, fever chills, aches, etc.
The young and elderly are at highest risk, as most folks with healthy immune systems are ok (after a brief but disgusting battle).
With his hands? :rolleyes:
Salmonela is not encountered as often these days but better safe than sorry.
Prepare chicken separately first and clean up thoroughly. Then proceed with the rest of the food preparation.
BTW There are throw away cutting pads to use for chicken to protect your cutting board.
This is important to re-read. Very few shows will be able to show how often you should be washing your hands, and still be able to get all of the cooking information in. Often enough, they skip important recipe-related points - or mention them but do them “during the commercial”/ahead of time so you can’t see - and confuse the heck out of the viewer as it is.
In Julia Child’s old classic show on PBS, she would sweep stuff off the counter onto the floor, scratch her head while explaining something and then immediately touch the food, and so on. I’d have still gladly eaten her cooking, though maybe not so eagerly if I actually saw her doing that while preparing a real meal. 
With things that are going to be cooked, why would it be a problem? I can see not touching things that are meant to be eaten raw with tongs or utensils that have touched raw chicken, but fried chicken? The whole thing is going to be fried and cooked.
When you wipe your hands on your apron after cutting chicken, and then wipe your hands on your apron while making a salad, you offer any bacteria on the apron a chance to try the salad.
Alton has a particular fetish about clean chicken due to a particularly bad encounter with Salmonella some years back. Personally, I take a much more relaxed view because I think being overly hygenic in your home kitchen is only going to come back and bite you in the ass if you go out to eat and get sick since it’s going to hit you a whole lot harder.
Cross contamination is only one link in a possible chain that leads to food poisoning; there is a level of pathogenic bacteria that you can safely ingest; infectious food poisoning occurs when you ingest a fairly large population; there are a number of ways to do this, including:
For example, let’s say you’re preparing a picnic; you plonk a bunch of chicken wings in a roasting pan and throw them in the oven, then, without properly washing your hands, you chop some potatoes for a potato salad - some bacteria from the chicken get transferred.
At this point, unless the chicken had really high populations of bacteria, the potato salad probably won’t make you ill. Smothering it with a mayonnaise-based dressing then leaving it at room temperature(or perhaps warmer, in the back of a car) until lunchtime will allow the pathogenic bacteria to really get busy and build up to population levels where even a small amount of the potato salad will certainly make you ill.
Also, somewhat incidentally, it is quite possible for the potato salad in this example to be dangerous to eat, but still to smell, look and taste quite normal - that’s a significant part of the reason to take more caution over food preparation - you can’t necessarily tell when things have gone wrong - it’s wise to err on the side of caution.
Avoiding cross-contamination is a sensible precaution; if adopted it as a habit, then most of the time, it may be saving you from a non-existent (or low-risk) danger, but it’s for the other times that you really need it.
(emphasis mine)
I’m curious why you call this out–I was under the impression that mayonnaise is essentially a nonissue when it comes to food poisoning. (since it’s pretty acidic)
Huh? Mayonnaise is raw egg yolk and oil. Leave some out in the sun for an afternoon and then smell it - it’s practically a bacteria factory!
That’s homemade mayo. Commercial mayo (which is what I was thinking of) would be pasteurized and has acid of some sort added to it.
Mayonnaise alone might be OK, but mixed together with nice moist potatoes, it makes an excellent culture medium.
Do you know what mayonnaise is made of? Vinegar is one of the ingredients, homemade or not. That’s the acid. According to an Ann Landers column a few years back, it’s safe to store mayonnaise in the cupboard rather than the icebox (she consulted with experts, apparently) but it won’t last as long.
It always seems that foods including mayonnaise are a liability for food poisoning. I imagine mayonnaise’s acidity protects it when it’s on its own, but when it’s diluted by other ingredients in food, the acidity becomes insufficient to protect it, and then it turns into a nice moist, nutritious culture medium. (Furthermore, it’s no doubt made with pasteurized eggs, as noted above, so if you don’t get any crud in it, it’s probably pretty thoroughly clean, microbe-wise, when it’s in the jar.)